|
I'm faced with quite the dilemma here. I hate the Tekken series with a burning passion, but I love Tekken: Dark Resurrection. Now how did that work? Last I checked, the game is layed out the same way as every other Tekken title preceeding it and no real overhaul was made to make it any different from Tekken 5. So, under these reaffirmations, couldn't Dark Resurrection be considered nothing more than another unoriginal, uninspired port, slapped onto the PSP and victim to unavoidable critique for being "more of the same"?
Hardly. It isn't so much what Dark Resurrection does over Tekken 5 that defines it, but how well it can keep up to its PS2 brother on rather limited hardware. The PSP is known to completely desecrate the original titles ported to it. Longer loading screens, downgraded visuals, and lack of content, regularly plague these conversions. Yet Dark Ressurection suffers from none of these. Loading times are incredibly quick and range from 1 to 3 seconds between battles.
This is surprising, because the game is the spitting image of its PS2 counterpart and its shortcomings would only be obvious to someone who has played both for an extended period. For a PSP game and considering the handhelds history with trying to produce anything in 3D without general lag, this is a rock solid accomplishment. Character models are vividly animated and look great. So do the stages, which are the same locations from Tekken 5, altered to show a different time of day, or some other effect. It's a smart way to revitalize the gameplay by adding subtle changes that make for huge differences (i.e. Moonlit Wilderness changes to a daytime meadow).
If anything, the game feels a lot faster and more exhilarating because of the drastic overhaul of the game's audio.
|
A long list of composers were put to work tweaking the game's score. Tracks based on themes from characters and maps in the original game were remixed this time around, offering an interesting alternative side to things. If anything, the game feels a lot faster and more exhilarating because of the drastic overhaul of the game's audio. It's a very minor change, but it subtly makes the game's content feel fresh again.
Since Tekken 3, the series has always offered a large list of game modes and settings. Dark Ressurection offers the core modes expected from every fighter (Story, Arcade and Practice Battle), with others that range from strangely addictive (Tekken Dojo is a typical raise the ranking tourney) to just plain strange (see: Tekken Bowling). There is a network mode, but it's very misleading in the sense that it doesn’t allow for online versus play, but mostly uploading and downloading ghosts and scores. This virtual recreation of actually online play is, to be honest, fun, albeit still a little disappointing.
It is the same game, though, meaning that certain unlockables will undoubtedly be the same. Gladly, gold is much easier to come by in this iteration, making character customization more invigorating than an actual chore. And if you're not quite up to unlocking every character's ending the old-fashioned way, they can also be purchased in the Theater Mode -- a perfect alternative for those who've already seen the afterevents of Tekken 5.
Theater extras as well as character customization are available for purchase as expected, but luckily have been discounted from the hefty price tags they bore in T5. While the unlockables are no penny bargains, it is much easier to buy things in this title. Those who have immediately jumped into Dark Ressurection may not notice it, but to vets, it is seriously nice to see such an important factor get tweaked.
It doesn't take a brain surgeon to realize that Bandai Namco has come up with a well-polished and deep 3D fighter. Tekken: Dark Resurrection is a rock-solid rendition of the famed PlayStation 2 game and, while it is something of a port of the arcade game, it's still fresh and fun. Offering new faces, added modes, and an interesting twist to several game mechanics, Tekken: Dark Resurrection is a clear message to fighting fans everywhere that you can still teach an old dog new tricks. But unfortunately, like Heihachi, repackaged goods just never seem to actually die.
|
